Desktop and wall-mounted telephones have been in widespread use for a number of years. Such telephones typically employ handsets which include a speaker and a microphone for enabling users to communicate with others over the telephone. In modern desktop and wall-mounted telephones, these handsets are often complemented with additional speakers and microphones for enabling hands-free use of the telephone.
For the purposes of enabling hands-free use, speaker apertures which allow audio to pass from an internal speaker to the user are often large and clearly visible to the user. In contrast, with increasing innovations in reducing the size of electronic components, microphone apertures which allow audio to pass from the user to an internal microphone during hands-free use are becoming smaller and smaller, and accordingly less visible to the user. Adding to these reductions in size, technical advantages are realized by locating the microphone aperture precisely in locations which are even less visible to the user.
That is, for a number of years, desktop and wall-mounted telephones have been designed to include microphone apertures as close as possible to surfaces adjacent the telephone. For example, in desktop telephones, microphone apertures are often located on a bottom surface of the telephone only millimeters or centimeters from a desk surface on which the telephone rests. The reasoning behind such microphone aperture placement is to reduce echo problems.
Specifically, in hands-free use, a user does not put their mouth close to the microphone on a handset. Rather, the sound comes from the user's mouth, travelling much further and bouncing around off of the ceiling and walls, and in particular from the desk surface before reaching the microphone via the microphone aperture. This energy is fairly high and is known in the art as “desktop bounce.” The microphone aperture and microphone are thus usually placed as close to the desk surface as possible, which will favor the energy coming straight from the user's mouth and, with luck, the energy that bounces off of the desktop will “miss,” or, in other words, be at a lower level than that coming from the speaker's mouth.
The small size and discrete location of a microphone aperture for hands-free use makes it particularly challenging for user's to appropriately direct their speech to the microphone aperture. This problem is exaggerated by the typical inclusion of large, easily visible speaker apertures, which are often mistaken for microphone apertures. This problem is further exaggerated by the increased use of directional microphones which have high sensitivity for only a narrow range of directions.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems, apparatuses and methods for overcoming these and other problems in the art.